Atom Smasher May Create "Black Saturns" 423
David Shiga writes "If we ever make black holes on Earth, they might be much stranger objects than the star-swallowing monsters known to exist in space. According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring — forming a microscopic 'black Saturn'. This could happen if extra dimensions exist, as string theory suggests, and if they are large enough." An evocative excerpt from the article: "...there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut."
Re:Now wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Um..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Um..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Questions from the Peanut Gallery (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
... a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut ...
I get the impression that the "small size" thing is supposed to be reassuring. But aren't all black holes comparatively small, compared to what they've had for lunch? How big would a black hole be that, say, had accidentally swallowed the Earth? And I suppose mass should also reassure me. But the thing is, my gradeschool science oversimplification of black holes said their defining characteristic was not their mass but their insatiable, chain-reaction-like desire to swallow more mass ... like a rolling snowball.
And it's all well and good to say some theoretical rays we've never seen before will magically swing in at the end and save us, but... Since this is testing an unproven theory and not applying a well-understood theory, what are the procedures for evaluating the level of risk?
And what is the recourse of those who don't agree? Science has ethical guidelines for not experimenting on humans because of risk. Does the fact that humans are in the next room ... or the next building ... or the next city, "safely away" from the black hole being created, mean that there is no ethical obligation for informed consent? It would seem like there are more rules governing putting make-up on a rat than there are on this kind of experimentation...
I don't know the details of this kind of thing. I just have to trust someone doing them does. But I wonder exactly what I'm trusting. Anyone know?
Re:4D black donut? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Now wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Now wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Now wait a minute.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime [wikipedia.org]
Re:You know all those unexplained gamma-ray bursts (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, yeah, violates the laws of thermodynamics, etc. Homer's going to hate this. It's called "Inflation Theory" and involves generating a bubble that grows fast enough that the quantum foam inside cannot recombine. As the quantum foam switches from being virtual to being physical, the probability of a particle being matter is greater than that of it being antimatter, which results in a net positive increase in the total matter/energy in the system.
Is this likely to happen? No. Is this likely to happen within the next couple of hundred years, even if we build a supercollider the diameter of the planet? No. The energy density required are stupendous. I recall seeing it put at the same as the total energy released from a hydrogen bomb packed into a cubic centimeter. Supernovae that produce neutron stars or magnetars do not produce high enough energy densities to kick in inflationary effects.
Would it matter if it did happen? Probably not. The only known strong candidate for an inflationary event was the Big Bang (and even that has been disputed). It has been suggested that when a supermassive Black Hole forms, the required energy density is reached, creating a "blister" or "bubble universe" attached to this one via the singularity. If that does indeed happen, the massive blast of energy would never reach this universe and therefore have zero impact on anything in it. Once the Black Hole evaporates, the bridge no longer exists (since it requires the singularity) and still nothing can cross.
The kind of Black Hole that the LHC could churn out - quantum black holes - barely qualify as black holes at all. Singularities have to have spin, but the net energy of a virtual particle (which a quantum black hole is) must be zero. I think it is most unlikely, then, that a qbh is even in the same class of objects as those formed from sufficiently large supernovae. There are other criteria for black holes (one of the oddest, IMHO, is that all black holes have an internal resistance of 33 ohms) and it would be extremely odd if any of them were satisfied by a qbh. As qbh's continuously form and unform throughout all quantum foam, and as we're not seeing any background Hawking Radiation, I would have to say that these are totally different animals and that they are not Black Holes at all in the same sense as their supermassive cousins.
John Titor Anyone?? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/the_john_tito
An interesting interview with Larry Flynt:
http://www.larryflynt.com/notebook.php?id=95 [larryflynt.com]
I have my fair deal of scepticism against John Titor and the claims he has traveled from the future to fetch an old IBM machine besides testing the time-machine, but so much that he wrote about in 2000-2001 thereabouts, has in fact come true. These are just the broad ones:
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/ [strategicbrains.com]
This is yet another drop in this mans pretty hefty prediction bucket. At the time of this link, there were no mentions of black holes being generated in the new smasher, but now it seems that this too will come true (if possible), and very much in the same timeframe as predicted too!
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread124980/
This is the person who even told Hawking was wrong, and later Hawkin conceded he was wrong on the subject!
http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-bin/forum
Time Traveller The Movie. John Titor doesnt HAVE to be proven correct. WE can DO something about it, starting with ourselves!
http://www.fasttrackproductions.biz/TimeTravel_0.
A site that is covering news in the media and corelating it with Titors predictions:
http://www.johntitor.com/ [johntitor.com]
I dont claim any of this is true, in whatever what you regard as truth, but when reading this, it is startling how accurate the person who wrote those messages in 2000-2001, is describing the trends of our society, problems of the US, Mac Cow Disease, CERN beginning to experiment with mini-black holes, and much more.. For the sake of our planet, and our future, it is worth considering living as THOUGH weve already been through this, than not. He describes a more primitive, but also a more enlightened society if you read the archives from the first link.
Re:Now wait a minute.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lorentz invariance. Could very conceivably be observed to not hold. Especially since we haven't studied it yet at the high energies the LHC will give us. If Lorentz invariance fails at any energy, string theory (along with most 20th century physics) fails completely.
Number of dimensions. If we do extra dimension searches at LHC (and believe me, they will be done) and find that there are 7,342 dimensions, string theory will be ruled out. Interestingly, Quantum Field Theory will not.
These are two conceivable observations which would rule out string theory, and make string theorists give up on string theory. There are many others. The fact that they coincide with predictions from other theories (for the most part, the number of dimensions doesn't coincide simply because QFT doesn't nail down a number of dimensions) doesn't make them any less predictions.